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All right, our next guest is Phil Giraldi.
He's a former CIA and DIA officer, and he's the executive director of the Council for the National Interest Foundation.
That's Councilforthenationalinterest.org.
And he writes for the American Conservative Magazine and for Antiwar.com.
And the latest at Antiwar.com is really great.
I hope you guys will take the time this weekend to look at it or something if you can.
It's called Talking Turkey About Zionism.
Welcome back to the show, Phil.
How's it going?
I'm fine, Scott.
How about you?
I'm doing great.
Appreciate you joining us.
No problem.
Okay, so this guy, I don't know how to pronounce all his names, but his last name is Erdogan.
He's the prime minister of Turkey, and he got himself in trouble for some things that he said, which isn't new in Washington, D.C.
Phil, listen.
Yeah, well, Erdogan, at a U.N. conference in Vienna, was basically speaking on the issue of Islamophobia and was saying that Islamophobia should be something that people will fight against just like they should fight against other oppressive ideologies and ways of thinking, and he identified fascism, anti-Semitism, and Zionism.
And of course, fascism and anti-Semitism were okay, but when he mentioned Zionism that produced an instant reaction from neoconservatives and others in the United States.
You know, I guess it's really just the same as anything.
Nobody ever wants to talk about the actual argument and whether there's anything to it or not.
Everything is supposedly, listening to the public debate, it's always just supposedly, self-evidently crazy or hateful or wrong or whatever, but, I mean, geez, isn't there kind of a point there that Zionism sort of means, and if you're in the way, screw you, right?
Well, yeah, that's the point.
I mean, the point of my article was basically that the people who attacked Erdogan basically started attacking Turkey and attacking Turkey's record and what Turkey represents and so on and so forth.
And I tried to make the point that really, all right, let's see what this means.
Instead of the argument, you mean, they went ahead and started attacking Turkey instead of the argument he was making?
Yeah, that's exactly what they did, yeah, and I said, all right, basically, if you look at Zionism not as a philosophy or a political theory, but as what it is in practice, you can't get away from the fact that Zionism has meant the dispossession of millions of Palestinians, and this is an ongoing process.
It's not something that happened back in 1947 and stopped.
And so anyway, Erdogan had a point, and probably a pretty good point, and the guys who were attacking him basically were attacking him ad hominem and were making up arguments about why Turkey is such a bad place and so on and so forth.
So it was, yeah, exactly that kind of argument.
Let's say, all right, fine, you don't like Erdogan, but at the same time as what he's saying makes sense, and I think it does.
All right, now, Turkey has been an ally of the United States and NATO since the end of World War II and the establishment of the alliance, and Turkey's been, I always thought, longtime bosom buddies with the Israelis, and I mean government to government, bureaucrat to bureaucrat, intel officers and military men.
These guys are friends.
They share money and equipment and an American sponsor, and so what happened?
Well, there's a debate going on to what extent this break between the two countries is for real.
There's a lot of evidence that the Turkish military and Turkish businessmen in general have excellent relationships with their Israeli counterparts.
The point is, Erdogan is, you know, head of state, and to a certain extent, he has to take a different position, and the different position is essentially that since the Israelis killed those nine Turks two years ago when they were trying to bring in relief supplies to Gaza, Israel is kind of an unpopular country in terms of the Turkish viewpoint.
So Erdogan is in a position where he has to reflect that in terms of what he's saying and what he's doing, while to a certain extent, business as usual is continuing on other levels.
And now, did I characterize that business as usual correctly, you think, there as far as military and intelligence agencies and, you know, not even the deep state, but just, you know, the shallow end, just the governments, really?
Well, there's probably a lot of deep state stuff going on, too, because both Israel and Turkey have deep states.
Yeah, well, I mean, I just assumed that, but I mean, but what about just the almost surface stuff?
Yeah, well, the almost surface stuff is going on, too.
I mean, they've had, they've actually had some military exercises, I believe, that were not very widely publicized for obvious reasons, and there's been cooperation at various levels.
Yeah, I think there's clear evidence that that's taking place.
Yes, all these guys who decide they want to take out after Erdogan, they ought to be, you know, even if they want to be critical of him, they could just give him the left handed compliment that, yeah, well, you do what Israel likes anyway, so.
Yeah, well, you know, to a certain extent, that's true.
But the point is, Erdogan was making a good point and was jumped on because of it.
And then the ones who were the critics that I cited in the article, basically, you know, they were attacking Turkey for the fact that, according to one of them, religious freedom is substandard in Turkey, and that one of them called Turkey an Islamist regime, which is not even close to the truth.
I mean, Turkey has an extremely volatile political situation, and there are lots of people that basically are not supporters of any kind of Islamic agenda.
And these are the people, to a certain extent, that count in the country.
These are the military officers, the journalists, the academics, people who are key businessmen and all that sort of thing.
It's so there's not a simple way of describing the politics in Turkey any more than there's a simple way of describing it in the United States.
Right.
And, you know, actually, that was I kind of appreciate the fact that these guys made all these red herring arguments, if only for provoking you into writing this article, because it's well, I sure learned a hell of a lot about Turkey and just hearing you refute these different points.
And I think that one is, you know, first and foremost, an important thing, because it's pretty easy since, you know, 99 percent of us have never been to Turkey or even know anybody who has been or anything like that.
It's pretty easy to paint Turkey however you want, especially like in right wing media.
You could make it Osama bin Laden's Islamo-fascist caliphate if you want to, and they'll believe it at least for a weekend or however long you need them to.
And so it really is important.
Right.
That history of the secularism in Turkey and how, like you say, it's been there's a long history of it there.
And therefore, there are a lot of entrenched interests.
It's not like, you know, Mubarak and his few cronies.
They're huge, entrenched interests who are still kind of secular Turks.
And even with the election of the Islamists, it's really they're not the kind of Islamists that you read about in National Review, even if you're reading about these guys.
Right.
Yeah, no, I mean, you know, everybody who's observed Turkey in any serious way agrees that this Islamism that the dominant party there, the AKP, demonstrates is pretty mild stuff.
I mean, there was as recently as earlier this year, early last year, there was a major controversy over allowing women to wear headscarves at universities and everything like that.
And the fact is they're not allowed to wear headscarves at universities.
And it's only now at Islamic schools in Turkey that women can wear headscarves.
So the secular people in Turkey are pretty powerful and they're doing a lot of pushback.
And so it's again, it's not a simple kind of equation.
Turks are Muslims.
You know, the country is 90, I believe, 98 percent Muslim.
And the fact is you can't get away from that.
And what essentially the current Turkish government has done is it's kind of brought Islam out of the closet because under Ataturk, Islam had no role in government, no role anywhere near what we would consider government and institutions.
And now Erdogan is saying, look, I mean, we're all Muslims and let's try to legitimize what many people actually feel.
And that's essentially what's going on.
This is not suddenly the crazies are out of the box, although like in any other change, there will be crazies coming out of the box.
But it's not it's not what it's all about.
Well, and so you also talk in the article about the treatment of the different minority groups, ethnic and religious wise in the country.
And things must be far from perfect on that front.
Certainly.
Well, I don't know all that much about it, but I remember reading back in the 1990s about how Bill Clinton was shipping the Turks a bunch of weapons to use against the Kurds.
Yeah, well, I mean, look at it this way.
I mean, back in 1918, the Turks or the Ottoman Empire was a defeated power.
It was occupied by the British and the French.
And then a year or so later, the Greeks invaded.
And that's when the Turkish war of reconquest and everything took place.
And this was Ataturk.
And Ataturk's principle objective was to restore Turkey and to give it an identity.
This was a shattered people that really had no identity, had no purpose.
And so he basically brought in a lot of laws that made the country Turkish.
It required people to speak only one language.
I mean, you've heard the same kind of stuff in the U.S.
Speak one language, study one curriculum, keep religion out of politics.
This is what Ataturk pushed.
And this is Kemalism, which is what it's called, has been a dominant force in Turkey ever since.
So when you get a group like the Kurds saying, hey, we want to speak our own language, we want to have our own culture, that hits to the core, to the heart of what Kemalism is all about and what the Turkish revival in the 1920s and thereafter constituted.
Well, and so but how brutal does it get, though, on a regular basis, for example?
Oh, yeah, it gets brutal.
It gets nasty.
There's no question about it.
And I didn't attempt to exonerate any of that in my piece.
I just said, basically, look, this is why they see things the way they see them.
And, you know, this is this is ultimately the problem with most Americans.
We tend to see things through a kind of, you know, glasses that show us what we want to see.
And we don't understand that in other parts of the world, people see things quite differently.
Well, now, I think it was Eric Margulies who really characterized the rise of Erdogan and and kind of the a little bit of a pushing to the side of the old secularism as really the that's the real dawn of the Arab Spring or the Muslim Spring or the the democratic revolution in the region was that it's it really is, you know, Saddam or not or whatever.
It's becoming way too difficult to keep a dictatorship in the region.
People are just too educated with their satellite TVs, et cetera, et cetera.
Yeah, I think there's some truth to that.
I think I think actually it's more so that Turkey has become the model for many of the Arab states in terms of where they would like to wind up with with essentially a a pluralistic system that that has popular representation and that also is Muslim at its heart.
And I think that that essentially Turkey is a good model for that.
I mean, it's easy to knock Turkish democracy, but they have elections.
They have political parties.
They have an active press.
They have a lot of the things that we look for as as being part and parcel of a democratic system.
All right.
Now, if it's OK, I want to switch to an Iran question for you.
There's a story going around, I guess it's big news today that he's been indicted in court in New York.
Grand jury in New York has indicted a son in law of Osama bin Laden for material support for terrorism.
And I heard it reported on NPR and they sort of let it hang for a second.
Well, he's been in Iran, but without much more detail than that.
And so I just wonder if you know the story of this guy and do you know anything about the circumstances of his time spent in Iran or any kind of context that might matter there?
Well, he was he was one of the bin Laden family that was arrested by the Iranians when they were fleeing Afghanistan at the beginning of 2002.
And in fact, there are have been reports, which I think are credible, that the Iranians actually offered to turn him and the other al Qaeda that they and family members that they captured at the time over to the US.
But the George Bush refused.
He was going to do it himself, I guess.
But anyway, so he and yeah, he's been he's been a spokesman for al Qaeda.
So there's no question that under the applicable laws of war, as perceived by the US government, he's fair game.
And he is al Qaeda.
There's no question about it.
He's been active, played an active role with al Qaeda.
And I'm not even sure why they had to resort to material assistance, because he's certainly done more than that.
So it'll be interesting to see how this plays out, because he the way it's it's it's going, he might actually get tried.
Now, that would be really interesting to watch, to see what kind of defense he offers and to see what's what's set in court.
I wonder why they didn't just drone him to death.
And I mean, or just shoot him, right?
How many CIA agents are stationed in Jordan right now?
Why didn't they just kill him?
I don't know.
I mean, it was.
But then again, that suggests that the White House is willing to try him, which is interesting.
So you know, because it's had to be a top level decision.
They could have they could have killed him, I'm sure, or could have had the Jordanians kill him.
And so that's that is an interesting point.
I'd rather suggest we're going to actually see a terrorism trial, which would be kind of interesting.
Yeah, well, it sure would.
Okay, so now I haven't even heard right wing spin about this yet.
Okay, I just heard NPR mentioned he'd been in Iran and without any context like you just provided.
And so I just assume that the right wing talking point is Aha, see Iran, Al Qaeda, and no more details or context than that.
That's all you need to know that those two things are the same and best friends and working against us.
And I called for a lever this morning, actually.
And he said he didn't know the specifics of this guy's case, but that it was safe to assume that he was under the control of the Iranian government, if not under outright house arrest under more or less house arrest with the rest of them.
And those are the same people you're referring to there that they tried to negotiate with us over to trade for the MEK, etc.
Yeah, he was under house arrest, no question about it.
And you're right, the right wing sprint spin on this has been that not that the Iranians arrested this group, but that the Iranians were giving them shelter that they've been, they've been saying that the Iranians have been providing support for Al Qaeda, which of course is ridiculous.
It's, it's not a, not even nearly the same thing.
They, they arrested them.
They offered to turn them over to the United States, uh, if there had been any cooperation at all with the white house and, um, and, uh, and then they finally let them go.
And that's why this guy has resurfaced.
It's just amazing.
Sorry for the tangent, but in an amazing right wing propaganda in America, and I don't even mean like the kooky stuff, but I mean the more or less what counts as the center right media in America where every single thing they say is wrong or an outright lie.
And it's like, they're just drowning in propaganda.
They never let these people come up for air with a single true fact ever.
It's always BS always.
Well, that's why people are getting tired of it.
And I noticed even during the, uh, the Rand Paul, uh, filibuster, uh, which for which I, I give Rand Paul credit.
I mean, this is the first thing he's done that to my mind is really, uh, uh, significant, uh, in a positive way.
But, uh, but the thing was even there, like Marco Rubio, uh, was coming out with this comment to the effect of, uh, Oh yeah, the holder has not told us that, uh, uh, barring, um, uh, an imminent threat, uh, we won't use drones to kill American citizens on American soil.
I mean, Christ, this is not even the right question.
The right question is why is anyone contemplating using drones to kill anyone on us soil?
And who is the one that sits back and decides what is an imminent threat?
We know how that'll play out.
Yeah, exactly.
And I mean, to be fair to him, uh, geez, that's probably even as wrong as he got it as sophisticated as Republican thinking is on radio or on Capitol Hill that I can find anywhere.
You know, that's like algebra too.
Come on.
That's pretty good.
Sure.
They think it's probably just fine to zap somebody from a drone as long as you can claim there's some kind of imminent threat.
I mean, the guy had a water pistol or something.
I mean, it was just like, uh, it, this stuff never ends.
They don't seem to realize that if you, if you give just, just the government, just a little crack to get into to, to twist things around, they're going to do that.
That's been the history of the, uh, you know, of the last 12 years.
There's no question about that.
And it's about time people wake up to that's what's occurring.
I mean, all this stuff is, is, is wrong.
And, um, you know, but none of these Republicans are going to, are going to see it.
That's for sure.
That's why the Republican party hopefully will die a death at some point.
Maybe we'll bring the federalists or the wigs back.
Yeah.
I mean, there's a couple of few great things about that filibuster.
I guess one of them is watching the left wing crack up over whether it was horrible or wonderful.
Um, but it's going to be fun because it is just the beginning of the second democratic administration of Barack Obama here.
And so with this push, it could mean, uh, you know, at least some comedy as some of these Bush Republicans in at least maybe in the Senate, whatever people who are trying to suck up to Rand and continue to, uh, to watch them pretend to care about civil liberties at all.
Like remember John Ashcroft in the nineties complaining about the know your customer regulations where the banks were let loose on, uh, to spy on us all and turn over all of our information.
And they complained about carnivore and some of the warrantless wiretapping stuff going on back then.
And, and that should just be fun to watch, you know, these Republicans like a Ted Cruz pretending to be a ACLU guy, you know?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And as you say, the, the, the other interesting story of course is the crack up of the Democrats.
I mean, why was it that only two, two democratic senators got on the bandwagon on this, on this issue of drones killing people in the United States?
Uh, is party solidarity more important than doing what's right here?
Obviously it is.
One of them got on the bandwagon.
The other one came out there and cried nine 11.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's right.
That's right.
So it's, it's kind of scary.
I mean, I go, who do you turn to?
There's just, there's just nobody.
Our systems are so corrupted and, and, uh, by what's happened over the last 10 years that there's not really much hope for, for changing it.
Uh, I, I, I don't know.
I'm doing a piece right now on, on the APAC meeting this week in Washington.
I'm saying essentially if we go to war against Iran, that means that APAC is wins.
Uh, and, and, uh, what, what is the option for the, for us, for the rest of the people?
I mean, we're going to be in, in, in deep chemistry at no time that there's a war against Iran and, and, uh, and the average people that are going to suffer people like me and you.
And, uh, I said, you know, what is the solution here?
Do we all have to engage in civil disobedience?
Is that the only route that we have left?
I don't know.
I don't know what the answer is.
Yeah.
And even then, like what sort of civil disobedience is going to do it unless we somehow, you know, I don't know, get every sports and pop star to all lead a giant nationwide march on DC or something.
Nobody's interested.
How are you going to get them to do it?
You know?
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah.
I don't know.
And you know, I mean, it seems to me like Obama, and this is what do I know, but it seems like Obama wants a sort of status quo thing on Iran and he wants to basically just leave it, let the next president work out a nuclear deal, that kind of thing.
But on the other hand, as the leverage pointed out on the show last week, Hey, he's waging a region wide, not so covert war against Iran right now.
And that can turn into open warfare at any time.
Don't sell them short.
You know, he's as dangerous as Bush at this point.
Sure.
And especially with this Graham Menendez bill, which looks like it's going to fly through the Senate.
Yeah.
Well, there's a bill currently sitting in the Senate.
I think it's Senate resolution 96 or something like that.
It's basically directed against Iran.
It was sponsored by Lindsey Graham and Menendez from New Jersey.
And the two of them basically came up with this thing that if it was the wording is something like if Israel is compelled to attack Iran, the United States would provide full financial, diplomatic and military support.
So it's basically a conditional declaration of war.
The condition being that Israel can start it.
It's one of the scariest things to come out of Congress in a long time.
And it's it doesn't have it doesn't have the authority of war or anything like that.
So so basically, I guess Obama can ignore it.
But the fact is that this this kind of rhetoric and this kind of thinking is is absolutely amazing.
And it's just it puts the whole issue of war and peace in somebody else's hands.
Yeah, it's just amazing that it would even do that.
But then again, it's Lindsey Graham.
So I guess, you know, shocking, but not surprising.
All right.
Well, thanks very much, Phil.
It's always great to talk to you.
Okay, Scott, take care.
All right, everybody.
That's Phil Giraldi.
Talking Turkey about Zionism is the latest piece at Antiwar.com.
Also see him at the American Conservative Magazine and at the Council for the National Interest at Council for the National Interest dot org.
Tonight on the KPFK show.
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KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
See you on Monday.
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Ever think maybe your group should hire me to give a speech?
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